The marketing industry often evaluates the effectiveness of product packages, advertisements, or product features to provide information for making marketing and product development decisions. There have been four primary approaches to judge the effectiveness of a package, advertisement, or product feature: focus groups, eye-tracking, tachistiscope, and surveys. The focus group approach uses small groups of respondents recruited to a central location, such as a shopping mall, for the purpose of eliciting ideas and opinions concerning new and/or old package designs or advertising graphics. Since focus groups require a central location, group dynamics are not realistic of actual purchase settings, impact or findability cannot be measured, and there is large potential for interviewer bias. The eye tracking approach employs techniques to measure eye movements to assess what a respondent actually looks at within a competitive shelf context or within an advertisement. Although more scientific and quantitative than focus groups, it also requires central location testing, has moderator/interviewer bias, and requires specialized equipment that can make respondents feel like test subjects. The tachistiscopic approach requires use in central locations, such as a laboratory or shopping mall, of a tachistiscope, a large specialized device which presents visual images of packages, shelf sets, or advertisements for very brief periods. The results are normally used to measure package impact within a competitive shelf context (the frequency a particular package is noticed within the set of packages) or the attention-getting features of an advertisement (what elements the respondent saw). Tachistiscopes are expensive, and although scientific and quantitative, it requires a central location, and can have interviewer bias. Further, since these three approaches require central location testing, the sampling of respondents may not be geographically representative.
The survey approach employs a series of questions and varying response formats presented directly to respondents, and can be administered in a variety of modes (in person or on-line) and will often present the image of packages or advertisement for as long as respondents want to look at them. The respondents are then asked questions about the packages or advertisement. Although fast and inexpensive, current question and answer surveys lack measures of impact and findability of packages and/or features, and cannot be used to evaluate packages in shelf contexts. Thus, it would be desirable to evaluate reactions to product packaging, advertising, or product features to large number of respondents in a survey format which does not require a central testing location, avoids interview bias, and can measure impact and findability of such product package, advertisement, or product features.